My new white paper, Disciplined Agile Delivery: An Introduction, is now available free of charge from IBM.com. The paper overviews the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, a hybrid comprised of strategies from Scrum, XP, Agile Modeling, and other agile methods which is people first, learning oriented, and enterprise aware. DAD is the basis from which you can scale agile.

People first - People, and the way they interact with each other, are the primary determinant of success for a solution delivery project.

Learning-oriented - The DAD process framework promotes the ideas that team members should collaborate closely and learn from each other, that the team should invest effort to learn from their experiences and evolve their approach, and that individuals should do so as well.

Hybrid - DAD adopts and tailors strategies from Scrum, XP, Agile Modeling, UP, Kanban, and many others. It addresses many of the issues Mark Kennaley discusses in SDLC 3.0.

Goal-driven delivery life cycle - The DAD lifecycle is focused on delivery, not just construction. Furthermore it is goals-driven, the DAD process framework suggests various strategies to fulfill those goals but does not prescribe specific practices.

Risk and value driven - The DAD lifecycle is risk and value driven. It extends Scrum's value-driven lifecycle which produces potentially shippable software each sprint/iteration so that it explicitly includes light-weight milesstones such as ensuring stakeholder consensus as to the scope of the project early in the lifecycle, proving the architecture with working code early in the lifecycle, ensuring sufficient functionality exists before transition, and ensuring production readiness before actual release of the solution.

Enterprise aware - The DAD process framework promotes the ideas that DAD teams should work closely with their enterprise architecture groups to ensure they leverage and evolve the existing infrastructure, adopt and follow corporate guidelines, and work to the overall organizational vision. DAD teams are self organizing with appropriate governance.

I'm happy to announce that a revised version of the Lean Development Governance white paper which I co-wrote with Per Kroll is now available. This version of the paper reflects our learnings over the past few years helping organizations to improve their governance strategies.

My new paper Scaling Agile: An Executive Guide is now available. As the title suggests the paper overviews how to scale agile strategies to meet your organization's unique needs.

The executive summary:Agile software development is a highly collaborative, quality-focused approach to software and systems delivery, which emphasizes potentially shippable working solutions produced at regular intervals for review and course correction. Built upon the shoulders of iterative development techniques, and standing in stark contrast to traditional serial or sequential software engineering methods, agile software delivery techniques hold such promise that IBM has begun to adopt agile processes throughout its Software Group, an organization with over 25,000 developers. But how can practices originally designed for small teams (10-12) be “scaled up” for significantly larger operations? The answer is what IBM calls “agility@scale.”

There are two primary aspects of scaling agile techniques that you need to consider. First is scaling agile techniques at the project level to address the unique challenges individual project teams face. This is the focus of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM). Second is scaling your agile strategy across your entire IT department, as appropriate. It is fairly straightforward to apply agile on a handful of projects, but it can be very difficult to evolve your organizational culture and structure to fully adopt the agile way of working.

The Agile Scaling Model (ASM) defines a roadmap for effective adoption and tailoring of agile strategies to meet the unique challenges faced by a software and systems delivery team. Teams must first adopt a disciplined delivery lifecycle that scales mainstream agile construction techniques to address the full delivery process, from project initiation to deployment into production. Then teams must determine which agile scaling factors – team size, geographical distribution, regulatory compliance, domain complexity, organizational distribution, technical complexity, organizational complexity, or enterprise discipline, if any — are applicable to a project team and then tailor their adopted strategies accordingly to address their specific range of complexities.

When scaling agile strategies across your entire IT organization you must effectively address five strategic categories — the Five Ps of IT: People, principles, practices, process, and products (i.e., technology and tooling). Depending on your organizational environment the level of focus on each area will vary. What we are finding within many organizations, including IBM, is that the primary gating factor for scaling agile across your entire organization is your organization’s ability to absorb change.

In 2009 I wrote a white paper entitled The Agile Scaling Model (ASM): Adapting Agile Methods for Complex Environments for IBM Rational. Apparently it's been taken down, which I think is unfortunate as it contains some interesting ideas that your organization may be able to benefit from.

The original white paper addresses several key issues:

It provides and explains a definition for disciplined agile delivery. A more up to date discussion of DAD can be found on the Disciplined Agile Delivery site.

It describes criteria to determine is a team is agile. I've explored this issue via several surveys over the years since then. See the January 2013 How Agile Are You? results.

It describes the ASM, which distinguishes between core agile development techniques, disciplined agile delivery strategies, and agility at scale. The ASM was superceded in early 2013 by the Software Development Context Framework (SDCF). Perhaps this is why the ASM paper was taken down??

It overviews the eight scaling factors which a delivery team may face, scaling factors which motivate changes in the process that you will follow and the tools that you will adopt. The SDCF provides my recent thoughts regarding scaling factors. I have also run various IT Surveys over the years exploring how well organizations fare at scaling agile.